The Fun Period Is Coming To An End
For over three-hundred years there has existed in the societies of the Western world a constantly shifting conflict between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. The Cavaliers have long hair, dress fancy, tell jokes, stay up late, drink a lot and let things generally go to pieces. Their motto is, Live It Up!
The Roundheads have short hair, dress plain, are in bed by ten, and their motto is, Shape Up! And if you don’t Shape Up, they kill you.
When we are Roundheads, we wish we were Cavaliers, and when we are Cavaliers, we wish we were Roundheads—for Oliver Cromwell.
In the next decade we will see in America a succession of Oliver Cromwells arise. George Wallace was the first. He is a sample. Others will follow. The third one will probably be successful.
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Every Good-Evil movement begins in this way, in an atmosphere of guilt, self-criticism and mass masochism. Once again, we realize we are in desperate trouble. Once again, the End of the World is at hand. We are in danger of atomic annihilation; we are polluting our air and poisoning our rivers. Millions are starving. There are not enough parking spaces. And it is all our fault. We, Society, Mankind, You and I, are to blame for all human ills, from assassinations to psoriasis, because we are not Good. We think evil thoughts. We are violent, vicious and venal. We are guilty!
But we can all be saved by universal love and by good will. Those who will not accept this universal love are once again evil, wicked people, and soon it will become obvious that they do not deserve to exist. We will solve the ancient problem of Evil by eliminating those who are evil.
This period of blame fixing and self-castigation is, of course, normal and acts as the necessary catharsis which will render impotent the established controls of the old (evil) Right-Wrong system. This classically leads to an era of permissiveness and chaos which ends when a man of the people appears, a man such as Paul of Tarsus, John Knox, Lenin or Adolf Hitler, whose Nazism was an excellent example of a Good-Evil system combined with nationalism. It saw the Germans as a down trodden victims and the rest of Europe as the evil oppressors. It could also be said that the Germans made virtues of their weaknesses, which at the time were brutality, paranoia and an indecent need to be dominated.
As yet, though, we in America are not quite ready for the Leader. We are still in the Fun period, and the normal development of the Good-Evil system may be retarded due to several unique factors. The Basic Roob for the first time in history is affluent and a social force, and the Basic likes Fun. He will maintain the Right-Wrong Morality, adapted to his specific “likes” and “don’t likes,” a little while longer.
-excerpted from “The Great Roob Revolution” by Roger Price (1970)